Brown University Receives $27 Million for Physician-Scientist Training

November 18, 2016

Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, has announced a gift of $27 million from the Warren Alpert Foundation to expand and enhance its M.D./Ph.D. program and endow a professorship in the Brown Institute for Translational Science.

The gift includes $22 million to establish and endow the Warren Alpert Physician-Scientist M.D./Ph.D. and Advanced Training Program, more than tripling the funding for the program, which offers students the opportunity to pursue a joint degree with tuition assistance and research stipends. The remaining $5 million will establish the Warren Alpert Professorship, the first endowed professorship at the institute, enabling the university to recruit and support a new faculty member with in-demand expertise considered integral to translating scientific discoveries into applicable solutions to health issues.

The gift will bolster initiatives already under way to bring researchers from different fields together to decipher disease and improve population health, including efforts aimed at catalyzing biomedical discoveries and ensuring that advances in the field produce tangible health benefits through new modes of diagnosis, treatment, and prevention.

In 2007, the foundation awarded $100 million to the medical school, which was renamed in honor of Alpert. "This relationship with Brown has evolved beyond our greatest expectations," said Bevin Kaplan, director and vice president of the Warren Alpert Foundation. "In the beginning, it was hard to see beyond the impact of the physicality of the new space that our gift afforded. Now we have the privilege of seeing how the gift has also affected the quality of the student experience at the Warren Alpert Medical School, the recruitment of dynamic faculty and the far-reaching potential for current research."